How it works

• 1 × Herofrom $20
• 2 × Premiumfrom $15
• 3 × Mediumfrom $10
• 4 × Smallfrom $5

The price to take a spot is its current price plus the bigger of two jumps: a flat $2 or 10% of what the current holder paid. Whichever is larger applies, and the result is rounded up to a whole dollar.

The hero panel moves in larger steps than the small ones. Every spot shows its own exact number on the board, and that number is the one the checkout charges.

Your poster comes down and the new one goes up immediately. You get an email telling you what it now costs to take the spot back — at most one every 6 hours, however many times the board moves.

Nothing you paid disappears. Your brand keeps its total spend, its longest tenure and every spot it has ever held in the archive.

It happens: you open the checkout at one price and somebody clears a higher one before your payment lands. The spot goes to whoever cleared the higher price, not to whoever started paying first.

That risk is yours. A payment that lands after the board has moved past it is not automatically refunded, and being outpaced is not a fault to be put right — it is the board working exactly as described.

The protection against it is the amount you enter. The number shown is the minimum that clears the spot right now, not a reservation. Bid above it and you leave yourself room for whoever is typing at the same moment.

Everything paid into the board is counted towards one number, shown on the board itself. When it reaches $5,000, the ten posters get printed and put up on a real bus shelter — and the photograph of them goes out publicly, so anybody can see their poster actually there.

Hitting the number starts a clock rather than ending the game. Bidding runs on for another 7 days, and the board exactly as it stands when that week is up is the board that gets printed and put on the shelter.

So reaching the goal does not lock your spot in — it puts a deadline on it. Holding a poster on the last day of that week is the only thing that counts, which is the whole reason to hold one: it stops being a picture of a bus stop and becomes a bus stop.

Anything illegal, anything impersonating somebody, and anything that would make the shot unusable. A poster taken down keeps its place in the archive, and the spot is not resold underneath it.